By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | June 9, 2020
Israeli media outlets are trying to create a furore over a possible move by the Palestinian Authority to submit a resolution at the UN General Assembly condemning Israel’s annexation plan. “The solution to the conflict will come through direct negotiations in Jerusalem and not through political terrorism in New York,” declared Israel’s outgoing Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, about a non-binding resolution which will have no impact whatsoever on the looming land theft.
“Political terrorism” by Israel and the UN is actually what brought Palestinians to their current predicament. The UN’s willingness to disseminate the Zionist narrative that Palestine was a wasteland before Jews went there, and “a land without a people for a people without a land” has been much in evidence throughout the years, and the UN’s flawed Resolution 194 does not even begin to be preliminary compensation for what the Palestinians have lost since the 1948 Nakba. Indeed, “political terrorism” sums up the complicity between Israel and the UN; in particular the collusion in disseminating Israel’s security narrative as the pretext for the perpetual displacement of the indigenous population. Palestine, by the way, was never barren when Palestinian farmers worked their land.
“Political terrorism” against the people of Palestine was also normalised through the two-state compromise, which contributed to the permanent prevention of the legitimate return of Palestinian refugees. As the US-Israeli annexation plan draws closer, the UN will, undoubtedly, collaborate in finding ways to normalise the latest colonial expansion. The PA’s efforts to elicit anything more than verbal condemnation will, once again, be futile.
Israel Hayom described the possible PA move as a “battle”. The PA is just following perfunctory steps that have been proven worthless in terms of garnering diplomatic and political support for Palestine at an international level. There is thus no battle unless the PA alters its entire framework, swaps dependence upon the international community for Palestinian political involvement, and starts utilising its platform at the UN as an anti-colonial opportunity. As things stand, the PA is fulfilling international expectations by seeking recourse through non-binding resolutions. Palestine’s demise has been fuelled by non-binding resolutions alongside political violence.
Israel will lobby the international community for diplomatic support, yet whether this is forthcoming or not will make little difference to the annexation plan. As long as the world refrains from taking punitive measures, and not just against the annexation of Palestinian land, the PA’s recourse to the UN General Assembly presents no risk to the colonial-settler state. For the sake of its purported security concerns, Israel will, of course, play its perpetual victim card and pretend that it is facing an existential threat and opposition, or at least anti-Israel bias, from an institution that has consistently upheld and protected Zionist colonisation.
“The international community needs to know that legitimising Palestinian provocations rewards Abu Mazen’s [PA President Mahmoud Abbas’] refusal to hold dialogue with Israel,” claimed Danon. The truth is that the international community has only ever legitimised Israel and its colonial actions.
Moreover, there is no dialogue with Israel because complicity between colonialism and the international community has replaced Palestinians’ political rights with their subjugation. The US is now simply amplifying what the UN has intended since the 1947 Partition Plan.
Abbas and the PA pose no threat to Israel, and nor will yet another UN Resolution; Israel will just ignore it in any case, and get away with doing so as it has done on countless occasions before. It is the Palestinian people themselves who have the potential to lead a legitimate anti-colonial struggle. That is why the real priority of the international community on this issue is the persistent dissociation between Palestine and the Palestinian people, with the sole aim of protecting the destructive agenda upon which Israel was founded and continues to exist. That is what real “political terrorism” looks like, Ambassador Danon.